"What Would I Want? Sky"

Domino

Artists:

The only thing that stays the same with Animal Collective is change. Even if you don't think they're consistently brilliant, at least they're consistently different-- they have an open-minded, progressive attitude that I find more admirable as their profile grows. Like most of January's Merriweather Post Pavilion, "What Would I Want? Sky"-- from the forthcoming Fall Be Kind EP-- doesn't sound like anything the band recorded before it, but it still sounds like Animal Collective (call it style, call it voice-- they just manage to color everything they touch).

"Sky" is probably one of the more legible, straightforward pieces of music the band has released, and is also among the most immediately appealing: three minutes of lightly overdriven drum breaks and vocal lines dissolve into three minutes of high-gloss folk-pop. The guitars are audible, the percussion is recognizable. They probably could've made it easier to bob your head to; instead, they put it in a tricky time signature that feels like the meter infants learn to walk in. There's something here that reminds me of new age or yoga or the 1990s, but I can't put my finger on it-- whatever it is, it's appropriate coming from a group that has, through no specific positioning of their own, become the jamband for people who profess to dislike jambands.

Oh, on jambands: "Sky" samples-- and takes its title from-- Grateful Dead's "Unbroken Chain" (incidentally, the first-ever cleared GD sample). Considering the Dead are probably personae non gratae with a good chunk of the A.C. demographic, the sample comes as a nice band-fan challenge (personally, I've never been a big Grateful Dead fan, but my objections are musical, not social). In the original song, the lyric is "Willow sky/ Whoa, I walk and wonder why." In Animal Collective's version, the lyric is flipped: The end of the line becomes the beginning, and "Whoa, I walk" is deliberately misheard as "What would I want?" I mention it because it's what this band has always done for me: take a sound and turn it inside out to make something new, but something recognizable, even familiar.

[from the Fall Be Kind EP; out now digitally and due 12/15/09 on Domino]